As World Leaders Kick off Paris Climate Talks, Prescriptions Abound, from a Carbon Tax to a New Nuclear Push

As world leaders assemble in Paris for the Monday launch of the 21st round of negotiations aimed at improving on the ineffective 1992 climate change treaty, I’ve assembled some worthwhile reading on the risks attending human-driven climate change and a host of prescriptions worth considering. None will be easy to achieve.

In this new Anthropocene epoch, the “Age of Humans,” we have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives so interconnected that we are now a force of nature on a geological scale. By running our civilization on fossil fuels, we are both creating and destroying climates that our descendants will live in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years from now. [Read the rest of the Op-Ed here.]

A portion of a New York Times graphic shows the limits of pledges being debated in Paris climate talks.Credit The New York Times

On solutions, Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center has rounded up 32 signatories, including four economics Nobelists and three former cabinet secretaries — George Shultz, Robert Reich and Steven Chu — for a letter to Paris climate negotiators pressing the case for taxing carbon dioxide emissions. The text is below, along with a link to the letter as a pdf.

The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.

To be sure you don’t get the idea that only investors in nuclear technology are for this, please click back to an important “Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy” signed by 75 notable conservation biologists and posted just over a year ago by Barry Brook, chairman of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania and co-author of a paper in Conservation Biology that was the focus of the letter:

As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article “Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation” published in Conservation Biology (Brook & Bradshaw 2014).

Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.

Then there’s frontier research. On Friday, in case you missed it, details were leaked about Bill Gates’s planned Monday announcement of a global public-private research fund for clean-energy sciences and technology development.

Taxing carbon pollution will spur everyone ― businesses, consumers and policymakers ― to reduce climate-damaging emissions, invest in efficient energy systems and develop low-carbon energy sources.
This single policy change — explicitly using prices within existing markets to shift investment and behavior across all sectors — offers greater potential to combat global warming than any other policy, with minimal regulatory and enforcement costs.

We urge negotiators at the upcoming U.N. Climate Conference in Paris to pursue widespread implementation of national taxes on climate-damaging emissions.

We endorse these four principles for taxing carbon to fight climate change without undermining economic prosperity:

1.Carbon emissions should be taxed across fossil fuels in proportion to carbon content, with the tax imposed “upstream” in the distribution chain.

2.Carbon taxes should start low so individuals and institutions have time to adjust, but then rise substantially and briskly on a pre-set trajectory that imparts stable expectations to investors, consumers and governments.

3.Some carbon tax revenue should be used to offset unfair burdens to lower-income households.

4.Subsidies that reward extraction and use of carbon-intensive energy sources should be eliminated.

A portion of a cartoon by Brian McFadden, "President Obama's Modest Climate Change Goals." The full cartoon is at this link: j.mp/obamamcfadden.Credit Brian McFadden

To learn more about what President Obama actually has in mind, read the transcript of the most recent press call with senior staff going over the White House’s Paris game plan. I asked the first question, on whether the president might return at the end if things go well (the answer was no) and the limited focus on energy research and development.

As a coda, I have to add this Twitter note from Nick Sousanis about “The Fragile Framework,” his innovative collaboration with Nature’s news features editor, Richard Monastersky — a comic book telling of the 25-year history of climate change diplomacy and rising carbon dioxide emissions:

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.